Yeast Breakthrough Made for Cellulosic Ethanol

DomesticFuel.com
Posted by John Davis – September 13th, 2010

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have made a breakthrough that has some awfully big implications for cellulosic ethanol.

They’ve been able to put genes from grass-eating fungi into yeast and created strains that produce alcohol from tough plant material:

“By adding these genes to yeast, we have created strains that grow better on plant material than does wild yeast, which eats only glucose or sucrose,” said Jamie Cate, UC Berkeley associate professor of molecular and cell biology and faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). “This improvement over the wild organism is a proof-of-principle that allows us to take the technology to the next level, with the goal of engineering yeast that can digest and ferment plant material in one pot.”

Read more